“House Republican leaders released a long-awaited set of principles Thursday to guide the chamber’s debate on immigration, a balancing effort aimed at drawing a majority of Republicans without alienating Democrats who also would be needed to pass a bill.” [WSJ]

“The State Department is set to release a final environmental analysis of the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline as soon as Friday, according to several sources, setting the stage for a months-long endgame in one of the Obama administration’s most intractable environmental controversies.” [Politico]

“Campaigns for secretary of state, often relegated to the back burner of American politics, are drawing increasing attention from Democratic and Republican groups that hope to influence how elections are overseen in a number of presidential battleground states.” [AP via Washington Post]

That's gotta be it. Footballs just love to frolic with Hawks players. They just seem to nuzzle them and want to be petted and taken places and stuff. Gives me the warm fuzzies to see so many footballs so happy.

It was kind of hard to miss how the sometimes would literally struggle to get away from those mean ol' Bronco players, hecks, sometimes they'd just leap out of their hands when an opportunity to cuddle up with a Hawks player presented itself.

David
Simon, journalist, author and creator of two very successful HBO
series, “The Wire” and “Treme,” spoke with Bill Moyers this past week on
Moyers and Company on PBS about the condition of our economy and the
need to raise the minimum wage.
He told him that, “We are Reagan’s children, we are Thatcher’s
children, we bought this stuff hook, line, and sinker. We’re getting the
America we paid for!”

Moyers asked him about the call by the President in his State of the Union Address
for Congress to increase the minimum wage to $10 an hour pointing out
that had it been adjusted for inflation and increased productivity it
would be over $20 an hour now.

Simon told him that it is all based on the false belief that supply side economics would benefit all of us, rich and poor alike.

“I
think supply-side economics has been shown to be bankrupt as an
intellectual concept,” he said. “It’s not only unproved, the opposite
has occurred if you’re looking at the divergence in the economic health of middle class
families or the working class, what’s left of the working class
–certainly the underclass — and you’re looking at where the wealth of
the country is going and how fast. We are becoming two Americas in every
fundamental sense.”

As Simon pointed out, we have marginalized so many by showing them
that as far as corporate America is concerned they have no value that we
have already created two Americas, the America of the haves and the
other of the have nots. This cannot continue if the nation is to remain
strong and united.

He decries the notion that if we just let the marketplace have free
reign to do as it pleases, in the words of an old Merle Haggard song,
“We’ll all be drinkin’ free bubble-up, Eatin’ that rainbow stew.”

“I can’t get past just how juvenile the thought is that if you just
let the markets be the markets,” he said, “they’ll solve everything.”

Perhaps his most cogent argument in the interview was when he said:

“Why can’t Congress look at this and say “You know what, we say we
want these people working, we say we don’t want welfare cheats, we say
we don’t want the welfare rolls to grow. Here are people who are willing
to work full-time to be part of our service economy. Let’s give them
some discretionary income, they’re probably going to spend it buying
American products…”

Wilt Chamberlain was great at center. Only got called for high sticking once and had two singles to go with his perfect 300 in the first quarter. Then he literally tore up the back nine to finish six under!